“I love my era more than I love my country.”

Can a poet be sent to jail? Yes, he can be. In the ‘’Republic”, Plato argues that poets have no place in an ideal state, a utopian one, because they spread misinformation, stray emotions, and corrupt people's minds. Platonic criticism is established in three aspects: "the content about the gods," "the psychological effects of poetry—corruption of the soul," and "the essence of poetry—poetic imitation as an intrinsically ignorant process."

But Nazim Hikmet, a universally admired Turkish poet, was sent to jail, not by a state that was Platonically ideal by any stretch of the imagination.  His jailing was due to some activities that almost all illiberal and veiled liberal states consider seditious, namely, writing for and speaking out about people, their fundamental rights, deserving equality, and social justice.  The entire state apparatus went to war to silence him, only to see him instead wake up again and again like a phoenix bird with fluttering wings and become a nemesis of all oppressive regimes! His fearless voice erupted into a poem: “In the Nazim's blue eyes, they will find fear in vain." He believed, along the same vein as Earnest Hemingway, that man can, at best, be destroyed but not be defeated. So it’s not without reason that Pablo Neruda showered an immortal eulogy on the poet who loved more his era than his country: “Thanks for what you were and for the fire that your song left forever burning.".

Born into a family of parents, with the father being a civil servant in the Ottoman regime with an anti-establishment political mindset and the mother an artist, Nazim was steered towards poetry by his grandfather, who was a poet himself.  When talking about Nazim, the poet whose name inevitably comes to mind is Mustafa Kamal Pasha. First the comrade of the nationalist movement and later the main class enemy, this tyrannical hero represented his class.  Nazim took up the pen against this class-divided society. After becoming involved in the Turkish independence movement, at one point he traveled to Georgia, then to Moscow, wanting to see firsthand the Soviet Union after the socialist revolution. While studying at the Communist University there, he got acquainted with the works of Marx and Lenin and their great doctrines on the revolution of the proletariat. In 1924, he returned to the country with the dream of Turkey becoming independent. He returned to building a world without exploitation, oppression, and discrimination. He returned with his most cherished dream: to raise the newborn child, the modern nation in his eyes, with the utmost care. But the state, instead of getting owned and nurtured by its people, saw an ominous change in its popular leader. He turned into a power-hungry, camouflaged autocrat soon after gaining independence. Consequently, the growth of the newborn became a threat to him and scary for him. Because he knew that once the sleeping oppressed mass would wake up, he would not be able to escape. No wall could save him. So he wanted to arrest Nazim Hikmet. He evaded the police by a whisker and went to Russia. There he came into close contact with the prominent writers, poets, and artists and thus got paramount exposure to diverse cultures with an entirely new way of thinking. He returned to the country when the warrant was withdrawn from him in 1928. During the next ten years, he published nine books of poetry—five collections and four long poems—while working as a proofreader, journalist, scriptwriter, and translator. Meanwhile, the government in power banned the Communist Party of Turkey, to which the Nazis belonged. Spies and undercover agents spread across every nook and cranny of the country. People with even the remotest links to the party were randomly apprehended and jailed. The Nazis knew that it was the sign of intense fear that creeps into every autocratic regime. He took the cue from none other than Maxim Gorky: "They cannot douse our flaming spirit." Nazim stuck to his undeterred stand and went on to become the voice of the oppressed. The Turkish government wasted no time in imprisoning him for more than five years out of the next ten years. In 1938, he was again sent to jail for twenty-eight years for inciting a socialist revolution in the army. The closest comparison of such a steamroller of tyranny that an exploitative state would bring down on a poet for promoting the just demands of the people is Federico Garcia Lorca. He probably composed his greatest works during his time spent in prison at Edfa. People's sorrow, anguish, and hope blossomed like the royal Poinciana in his poetry, and the same breath flashed like an open sword. At Bursa Prison, he penned a poem that flaunted the feisty Hikmet at his fiery best: "Letter to my wife”

 “My one and only!

Your last letter says:

"My head is throbbing,

 my heart is stunned!"

You say:

"If they hang you,

 if I lose you,

 I'll die!"

You'll live, my dear—

my memory will vanish like black smoke in the wind.

Of course, you'll live, red-haired lady of my heart:

in the twentieth century

grief lasts

at most a year.

Death—

a body swinging from a rope.

My heart can't accept such a death.

But you can bet

if some poor gypsy's hairy black

a spidery hand slips a noose

around my neck,

they'll look in vain for fear

in Nazim's blue eyes!

In the twilight of my last morning

I will see my friends and you,

and I'll go to my grave 

regretting nothing but an unfinished song…

My wife!

Good-hearted, golden, eyes sweeter 

than honey—my bee!

Why did I write you

Do they want to hang me?

The trial has hardly begun,

and they don't just pluck a man's head

 like a turnip.

Look, forget all this.

If you have any money,

buy me some flannel underwear:

my sciatica is acting up again.

And don't forget,

a prisoner's wife

must always think good thoughts.

Trans. by Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk (1993)

Subhas Mukhopadhyay, India’s one of the major poets with the nation’s all-key literary awards to his credit and fondly dubbed as Bengal’s Nazim wrote its Bengali version, Jelkhanar Chithi,  with so much finesse that it has become a landmark work of translation.     

"People will lead people from bad times to good times." 

In 1949, Pablo Neruda, Paul Robeson, and Jean-Paul Sartre formed an International Committee to intensify the campaign for his release from prison where he took to fasting. He was released when the democratic government of Turkey came to power.

He knew the political paradigm that democracy is not always the guarantee of people’s right to freedom of expression and can be a gateway to dictatorial autocracy. After two assassination attempts, he returned to the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, the Turkish government revoked his citizenship. Nazim, one of the redoubtable poets of the 20th century who envisioned the world as the most beautiful sea, joined the Turkish freedom struggle at nineteen and breathed his last in exile in Moscow on June 19, 1963. He was repeatedly thrown in jail because of his conviction for communism. It is said that half of his entire body of work was written while in prison. He wrote under pseudonyms such as Orhan Selim, Ahmet Oguz, and Mumtaz Osman. Other titles bestowed upon him included romantic revolutionary, jail poet, and romantic communist. Nazim's poetry reflects the universal human experience; it is lyrically rich with potent imagery and skillfully crafted language. Influenced by the work of Russian poets like Vladimir Mayakovski, Sergei Yesenin, and the futurist group Hikmet sought to depoetize poetry by breaking free from traditional poetic forms and bringing poetry closer to the people. Composed in syllabic meter, his poems often tackle themes of love, freedom, social justice, and the human condition. Often compared with that of American poet Walt Whitman, his poetry introduced modernist techniques like broken lines and impassioned language, a style that reverberated with street vernacular and confirmed contemporary issues as legitimate thematic material. Talat Sait Halman in Books Abroad wrote, “Free verse with alternations of short and long lines, occasional rhyming, and wide use of alliteration, assonance, and onomatopoeia, a staccato syntax, was to remain the hallmarks of his art and his major influences on modern Turkish poetics.” In fact, from the 13th century until Nazim Hikmet, there was no revolution or any radical change in the real sense of Turkish poetry.

Between 1929 and 1936, he published nine books of poetry, became the charismatic leader of the Turkish avant-garde, and made Turkish poetry globally heard and influential. He also published several plays (Kafatası (1932), The Skull, Unutulan Adam, 1935—The Forgotten Man, Ferhad ile Şirin 1965—Ferhad and Şirin, Lüküs Hayat—Luxurious Living as a Ghostwriter) and novels (Yasmak Güzel Şey Be Kardeşim—Life's Good, Brother, 1967, and Kan Konuşmaz 1965—Blood Doesn't Tell).  He worked as a binder, proofreader, editor, translator, and screenwriter to support his large family, which included his second wife, his two children, and his widowed mother.

Nazim’s Human Landscapes from My Country, a collection of poems written in free verse spanning 20,000 lines in the form of a biographical dictionary that portrays the lives of ordinary people in an encyclopedic manner, is an account of the history of the twentieth century from the perspectives of multiple characters in Turkey. An excerpt of this masterpiece says it all:

A woman whose husband’s in prison always looks

                                                    in the mirror, always.

More than other women,

                               she fears getting old.

She wants the man she loves to like her still when he gets out,

no matter

                  if it’s thirty years later.

Put together with Pablo Neruda’s Canto General, another extensive and unorthodox artistic project driven by the ambition to muse on the entire history of a continent and of the world, My Landscape has redefined epic poetry in the aftermath of the Second World War. Structured on the lives of ordinary people, it presents an alternative history weaving human experience into the center of the historical narrative that spans nearly half a century from 1908 to 1950, deftly narrating a vast geographic sweep from the villages of Anatolia to Europe and Moscow. His technique of rapid cuts works brilliantly to create a moving collage of “human landscapes.” Here, for example, is a tell-all story of the cross-section he builds around only one moment during the night of September 3, 1941:

10:36 p.m.

The dignitary

         rose from the table

The others stood up, too.

“If you don’t mind, I’m going to bed–

                    please don’t get up.”

Tahsin (the doctor-Representative)

                               thought:

“Intelligence goes to sleep this early?”

10:36 p.m.

Monsieur Duval talked with Jazibe Hanum:

“I like your peasants–

              they’re patient and don’t make demands.

Your merchants aren’t bad, either,

and your government men are harmless.

Above all, you need to develop your agriculture.

And you need to get rid of statism . . .”

Nazim wrote “Human Landscapes” while serving a sentence of twenty-eight years in a prison at Bursa.

There are important similarities between Hikmet and Neruda that deepen our understanding of and engagement with the poetry of participation in the 20th century. Neruda's commitment and inner struggle are similar to Hikmet's, who also looks for a fresh voice to transform modern poetry by embracing the epic and crafting a comprehensive chronicle that coalesces history, geography, and time to construct a self-contained picture of a nation and its people. 

I mean, you must take living so seriously

  that even at seventy, for example, you'll plant olive trees—

  and not for your children, either,

  but because although you fear death you don't believe it,

  because living, I mean, weighs heavier.

— On living

He exploited popular or folk culture that’s intrinsically stitched into the national culture, analyzed it with a revolutionary and critical eye, and used his interpretations in poems. The plays, scripts, and novels he wrote, though few and unavailable in English translation in India, saw the same technique by and large.

The astute use of folk poetry has significantly embellished and fortified the crafting of "Epic of Sheikh Bedrettin" and the subsequent verses. With equal ease and élan, he also borrowed certain forms from both Western and Eastern poetry. Particularly in his poetry composed after 1921, the left-leaning Russian futurists and constructivists can be discerned. However, Nazim did not allow these influences to subvert his poetic imagination, which, bolstered by the reality around him, sometimes traversed beyond the border and the melting pot of his strong pro-people commitment. He crystallized the sources that he found useful and could be tested with a critical eye and injected them into his poetry.

Purveying the recurrent themes of humanism and universalism, he not only expressed the individual and social lives of the Turks but also added humanistic and universal elements to this realistic story. The basic concerns of all people on earth, such as death, the pain of separation, joy of life, love of parents and homeland, hope, escape, longing, grief, aging, etc., were used with strong opinions and in a beautiful form. Most importantly, in a language that everyone can understand. In his poems, in addition to these humanistic themes, we also see the universal problems of the world's peoples, such as peace, freedom, equality, brotherhood, justice, independence, and the end of oppression, exploitation, and tyranny. The poem of Nâzım, Kız Çocuğu—The Girl Child—airs a plea for peace from a seven-year-old girl ten years after she perished in the genocide of the American atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It gained worldwide popularity as a powerful anti-war message and was performed and translated into many languages by many singers and musicians, both in Turkey and in many other countries. It is also known in English by several other titles, such as "I Come and Stand at Every Door," "I Unseen," and "Hiroshima Girl.". Pete Seeger, the iconic and iconoclast singer, folk song collector, and songwriter who led the American folk revival and spent a long career advocating for folk music as a vital legacy and catalyst for social change, also expressed his inspirational debt to Nazim.Time could not consume his poems. This is proven by the fact that he did not see things through the eyes of the past but through the eyes of the present (that is, the future), and that he managed to capture the future in the present and the permanent in the temporary. 

there's no need to choose freedom:

you are free.

But this kind of freedom

is a sad affair under the stars.

— From A Sad State Of Freedom

One of Turkey's most beloved poets his works, many of which were written in prison, including the masterpiece Human Landscapes, have been translated into more than 50 languages. Nazim lived and wrote as a romantic revolutionary for much of his stormy and tragic life, which ended fatally in Moscow in 1963. Very few poets have had the vicissitudes of private and public life as inseparable from their poems as Nazim's. Most of his best works are an autobiographical account of the dramatic events of his life - the years of imprisonment, revolutionaries and prisoners, the exile of death. But even poems without real references fired the imagination of Turkish readers in particular, whose lines added pathos and persuasiveness because they knew the conditions of deprivation and pain that drove the poet.

Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk, who a few years ago was appointed editor-in-chief of the Turkish newspaper Radikal, criticized the lack of freedom of expression in Turkey in his cover story based on the example of Hikmet. In 2000, 500,000 Turks asked the government to restore the civil rights of Hikmet and return his remains. Hikmet, whose remains are currently in Russia, had said that he wished to be buried in Turkey in his 1953 poem Testament, translated by Ruth Christie. "Friends if it's not my lot to see the day / of independence... / if I die before that day / - and it seems I will - / bury me in a village graveyard in Anatolia / and if it's fitting / and a plane tree grows at my head, / then there's no need for a gravestone or anything else."Hikmet introduced free verse to Turkey in the 1930s, with his themes ranging from war to love. Despite his imprisonment, he retained a deep passion for Turkey. "I love my country", he wrote in one of his poems. "I swung in its lofty trees, I lay in its prisons. Nothing relieves my depression like the songs and tobacco of my country."

P.S: Numerous collections of Hikmet’s verse have been translated into English, including Human Landscapes from My Country (2009; trans. Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk), Poems of Nazim Hikmet (2002; trans. Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk), Things I Didn’t Know I Loved (1979; trans. Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk), The Day Before Tomorrow (1972; trans. Taner Baybars), The Moscow Symphony (1970; trans. Taner Baybars), and Selected Poems (1967; trans. Taner Baybars). 

Hikmet is the subject of Mutlu Konuk Blasing’s biography Nazim Hikmet: The Life and Times of Turkey’s World Poet (2013).